twilson1972
Warlord
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Yes i know a lot of stuff was procedural. Still an amazing achievement though and i can remember skipping school to play
Anyway apologies for drifting offtopic
Is it time to move on? - Discussion/Debate
- Thread starter TheMarshmallowBear
- Start date
Yes i know a lot of stuff was procedural. Still an amazing achievement though and i can remember skipping school to play
Anyway apologies for drifting offtopic
Sedwick
Parent, then Civ'er
Of course, the problem with that course of action is if enough people wait for the expansion, not enough will buy the first iteration and thus the expansion may not happen.
Not that I'm judging anyone; I will probably do the same thing. Or I might do what I did for Civ V, where I bought vanilla, heard how bad it was, and waited to acquire G&K before playing. That would produce the sales, keep the faith, and minimize wasted time and frustration.
Paszczak
Warlord
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- Dec 23, 2013
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It's because modern reviewers use a corrupted score system. It's supposed to be a 1-10 scale with 1.0 being terrible and 9.5+ being awesome games, but in reality no game ever gets less than 5.0 from professional reviewers, so it's more like:
5.0 - terrible
6.0 - bad
7.0 - below average
8.0 - average
9.0 - above average
9.5 - good, but not great
9.8 - great
Those are some weird times we live in...
It's because modern reviewers use a corrupted score system. It's supposed to be a 1-10 scale with 1.0 being terrible and 9.5+ being awesome games, but in reality no game ever gets less than 5.0 from professional reviewers, so it's more like:
5.0 - terrible
6.0 - bad
7.0 - below average
8.0 - average
9.0 - above average
9.5 - good, but not great
9.8 - great
Those are some weird times we live in...
Yes thats true also. One example of such a game was Stardocks unforunate Elemental - War of Magic
http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/elemental-war-of-magic-review/1900-6275189/
Even though the reviewers admit it was unplayable they still awarded it 4/10. Although that said if a shell of a game is there a quick patch may fix the worst problems and bump the score to a 7/10. Frequent crashes are the worst things to bring down a score.
What else is good besides Civ 5?
-I have Elemental - Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes but I'm waiting for the next patch to come out which is supposed to bring it up to a new level. Otherwise it just doesn't quite make to where I want it to be.
-Endless Legends I'm wary of because I absolutely hated Endless Space
-I'm thinking GalCiv 2 (I wasn't real impressed with GalCiv 1)
-What about Stardrive 2 or Worlds of Magic?
Delnar_Ersike
Prince
We're getting dangerously offtopic, but I'll indulge you:
- If you didn't like Endless Space, you won't like Endless Legends. Same featureless, clean UI, same neat ideas implemented substandardly, same monotonous gameplay that still makes time fly.
- If you like strategy games that look fairly simply but have huge strategic depth (like Civ4), you won't like GalCiv 2. I certainly didn't. It mostly comes down to the fact that the only real competition in that game is combat (economic/industrial competition basically evolves into who can build the most ships, technological competition basically evolves into who can get the best ships and help themselves economically/industrially to build more ships), and the combat itself is lacks any depth: you just send ships at each other and the combat system is quite literally a rock-paper-scissors, where 3 flavors of attack (energy, projectile, missile) can be defended against via 3 corresponding flavors of defense (shields, armor, PDM). These flavors don't even correspond to any possibly meaningful differences (eg. energy could have been short range and rapid-fire, missile could have been long range and slow to fire, etc.), they're literally just types of attack. There are no carriers that can deploy small drones, no bombers specifically designed to hit large ships and run, nothing. You're better off playing Civ4's Final Frontier mod.
- I don't know much about Stardrive 2 and Worlds of Magic, though I'm sure you can find plenty of varied opinions on either's Steam community hub, if nowhere else.
- Civ4, if you haven't already. Go play the original game, it's really quite good (it's in my second tier of "best games ever", which is probably the best any game can achieve given that my first tier is reserved for the likes of Deus Ex and Planescape: Torment).
- Warlock is decent. I would actually recommend Warlock 1 over 2 because 2 added a bunch of extra "mission"-type tasks that tried to implement more RPG mechanics, but I don't necessarily want an RPG in my 4X. Anyway, Warlock is serviceable, with greater emphasis on combat while still having enough empire-building to keep it a 4X (unlike eg. Sins, which really is a slow-paced RTS with some 4X elements). Its UI is a lot more fiddly than Civ's (eg. you can't fortify units or put them to sleep, so you'll constantly be cycling through your reserves, telling them to skip the turn), its AI is both dumber and less modable than Civ5's (believe me, I tried, though you won't find my mod on its forums because I got banned after asking how I could upload it to Warlock 2's Workshop if I didn't actually own the game, but knew my Warlock 1 mod would work without any changes in Warlock 2; the question of how I knew is why I got banned, if you know what I mean given that it doesn't have a demo, even though I had no intention of playing Warlock 2), and it doesn't punish expansion at all (so ICS is the way to go), but that's really most I can think of minus-wise. Plus-wise, it has a nice racial mechanic (there are 3 races in the game with different units, upgrade paths, and resource production/consumption, but you can acquire and settle cities that are different than your starting race's), its city growth/building system is an interesting alternative to the civ series' (buildings are built on tiles like improvements and can be pillaged, each city population lets you support one building, there are usually more buildings available than you can have population in a city, certain tiles allow you to build two special buildings, usually one unlocking a new unit type and the other giving all units produced in that city a special, free promotion), and its promotion/hero system is the best I've seen in a 4X, and that includes Fall from Heaven's. This is one example of a decent, 7.5-ish game that I was willing to buy for its price, since it's solid enough for what it does to still be enjoyable for at least 40 hours.
- Civ4's Final Frontier mod, preferably with the Final Frontier Plus modmod, which adds a few things that were oddly missing from the original mod, like wonders. Probably the best space 4X I have played so far, though admittedly I haven't given MoO2 a chance yet.
- Civilization Colonization is an excellent modernization of the original game from quite a while back. Given that it's essentially a commercially sold Civ4 mod developed by Firaxis, it's to Civ4 what CivBE is to Civ5, only this one is good: enough rules were changed to really differentiate CivCol from the main civilization series, such as an emphasis on having to staff stations with your population (instead of working tiles), no tech tree, an emphasis on acquiring and trading various goods to build certain buildings and units (eg. Militia require arms and food; arms are something you can purchase from the homeland, acquire through trading with other colonies, or produce yourself via the smithy from metal/iron), more in-depth naval unit types, no tech tree, interesting interactions with natives, and a clear endgoal of declaring and winning independence from your monarch.
- Civ4 with the Fall from Heaven 2 mod, possible with Ashes of Erebus or Orbis modmods, which add a lot more things to the original mod (like guilds and a magic-hating, Steampunk civ); arguably, they might add a bit too much, so try the original mod first before trying out the modmods.
A very good point, although I hope this trend changes with Ci6, since Ci2 though that has been the case, wait for expansion(s) before purchasing.
Sometimes I try to switch to Total War Rome Gold Edition, but it doesn't last. Just keep coming back to civ, lately only civ 5, but any(except the now ancient civ 1) will do. The game just never repeats itself, every time you start a game you face a new challenge, it just can't be beat.
The thing about any Civilization game is that it changes a common person, such as you and me into a deity, an immortal, thrust into an incredible role of deciding virtually every factor of your tribe's advancement, or fall in the greatest race of all time, the race to become the dominant tribe in the world.
There's just nothing else out there like it, at least in the gaming world.
Civ 5 still has plenty of energy in it but to me it is let down by the
-mediocre scenario's
-annoying global happiness system (1 population too many sends your whole Civ to a grinding halt). Capturing just one city almost inevitably makes your civ unhappy (imagine the population of Rome revolting when they captured Carthage after the Punic wars
)-playing wide early is unviable
-luxury trading system gets tedious and feels pointless after a while
-tile improvement is just tedious micromanagement
-tech tree is badly balanced and implemented
-inbalance in many features such as religious beliefs and social policies which means that you realistically have less choices than are presented. How many people have chose Liturgical Drama as a religious belief?
-poor AI
-playing a huge map is not an option unless you have a supercomputer
The game is saved by the nice graphics, wonder cinematics, and how most features integrate quite seamlessly; trade routes, diplomacy, religion, ideologies etc... Basically there's enough stuff going on to keep the player interested which is what makes it so addictive
bison21
Warlord
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2012
- Messages
- 221
I don't share the pessimism about Civ6. I think Civ5 vanilla was wobbly because of the 1UPT change, which is a massive game changer. I also disagree with Delnar_Ersike's "design elegance" arguments since for me they all read the same: "I liked Civ4 more because it's closer to what I deem a good game", and well, that's entirely subjective. And my subjective bias is: a game whose entire military aspect is dominated by SoDs is far from elegant to me.
I didn't buy BE because I don't play futuristic themes, I watched all the promo stuff but I just hate the dark/neon colours, the overall feel and I have had to stop playing beloved franchises because of it before (why, Anno 2170, whyyy).
I will be buying Civ6, even pre-order depending on what the preview stuff looks like. Great fan of Civ5 and, call my a cynic but I don't see fireaxis doing anything particularly different or bad in this day and age of gaming.
I didn't buy BE because I don't play futuristic themes, I watched all the promo stuff but I just hate the dark/neon colours, the overall feel and I have had to stop playing beloved franchises because of it before (why, Anno 2170, whyyy).
I will be buying Civ6, even pre-order depending on what the preview stuff looks like. Great fan of Civ5 and, call my a cynic but I don't see fireaxis doing anything particularly different or bad in this day and age of gaming.
Delnar_Ersike
Prince
Stacks of doom were actually best addressed in Civ4 through the use of collateral damage (ie. some units dealt damage to all enemies in the stack); it's too bad it was only given to siege units though.
1UPT's disadvantages are far worse than stacks of doom: while stacks of doom affect unit placement and only unit placement, 1UPT's side-effects of bias towards smaller armies, having production spent units be more valuable than production spent on buildings, elimination of auxiliaries (combat units that have greater value as utility/support units; when you can only station one combat unit per tile, dedicating any tile near a fight to a unit that is not good at combat is a waste), and elimination of worker support (multiple workers working on the same tile to speed things up) has a detrimental effect on unit composition and production choice, things that encompass a lot more of the gameplay experience and overall game strategy than unit placement.
I'm guessing you didn't actually read my long post; my guess is because it's, well, long. I deem Civ4 to be great because of its elegant design, not the other way around ("Civ4's design is elegant because I deem it to be great"). Elegant design, which is also sometimes minimalistic, is way of maximizing depth using as few rules/modifiers as possible. Civ4's way of incentivizing democratic governments to not go to war is elegant because it relies on the fact that democratic governments' bonuses come from an improvement that takes time to develop combined with units' ability to pillage improvements.
I can even give you an example of elegant design in Civ5, though it honestly took me a while to find one (besides stuff that was already elegant in previous games and was carried over into Civ5, such as how chopping gives a flat amount of production and how great people work overall): the scaling of increased policy costs from the number of cities. Specifically, policy cost roughly increases linearly with number of cities, but the final policy cost always has an extra constant added onto it (25 at 1 city with 0 previous policies). As a result, if you build cultural buildings in your cities, there will always be a point at which the total cultural output of having more cities will net you policies faster than if you had less cities (since if all cities' cultural output is equal, you effectively have more culture income working towards covering the base cost bit). It's a way of replicating the Civ4-style "new cities are an investment" dynamic, but with culture instead of gold. The reason this is elegant is because it comes from two "rules": the per-city scaling of policy costs is less than the base policy cost (cost of a policy with no extra cities), and that all cultural buildings can be built in all of your cities. From these two rules, a whole array of "how could I improve my overall culture the best?" could have been generated (eg. is spending gold on a settler to settle a city better than spending that gold on a cultural city-state and picking up culture-boosting policies earlier), if only Civ5's happiness system didn't axe the whole idea.
It's not like Civ5 had no possibility of having elegant designs, either. For example, the way religions are implemented could have been a stellar source for such elegant design. If all beliefs (except for the reformation belief) had effects that did not scale over time, it would have made religions in Civ5 like the religion civics in Civ4: they would give a huge bonus in the earlygame, then slowly become negligible as the game progresses. Instead, however, a lot of beliefs (Tithe, Pagodas, faith pantheons, etc.) are just as important to have in the later on, ruining the chance to make the religion system's prominence change organically over time.
That's quite a superficial reason to not play a game you may otherwise like. I, for example, dislike Western themes, but I still found the time to play the better Call of Juarez titles because, well, they are good games, regardless of their theme.
Their trajectory indicates otherwise. I've played enough CivBE on my brother's account to know that it's worse than the first 4X's of some upstart studios (eg. Endless Space). Sid Meier's Starships is three times as shallow as CivRev. Let's not even begin with CivWorld.
You're not a cynic, you're probably just more a of a fan of tactics and overt design than most people I know who have played Firaxis games in the past. Firaxis games in the past were the best examples of 4X's because of their subtler designs: newcomers could more easily grasp the simpler modifiers (whereas other 4X's often relied on a the types of obtuse modifiers that are in Civ5), while veterans realized that the way these simple modifiers were designed and planted throughout the game generated myriads of nuanced strategies. Over time, they developed an elegance to them, as proven systems were refined and faulty systems were replaced with something yet untried. The Civ5 design team discarded a lot of the systems that they deemed to be unintuitive and replaced them with more tangible ones, but they threw the baby out with the bathwater in doing so: some of those systems (eg. city maintenance) were only unintuitive because of UI failings, and while their replacements may be easier to understand (eg. happiness), they are a lot shallower and generate less viable gameplay possibilities than the systems they replaced.
bison21
Warlord
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2012
- Messages
- 221
I don't really want to respond to you since you accuse me of not reading your post and judge my reasons for not playing a game, which is completely up to me. I wasn't criticizing you, I simply disagree.
Futuristic themes are completely immersion breaking for me. I have wasted lots of money buying games, thinking "I will just play it" and left them because I just couldn't enjoy it.
Of course you think the causality runs: Game great -> therefore I like it. But what makes you think a game is great is the prior factor. I think what you keep describing as elegance is a preference for complexity of different resource-optimizing strategies, which I can understand. I would agree that Civ5 has less resource optimization opportunities, which is probably why many people feel it is stripped of features that Civ4 had. What you prefer is subjective, however.
Futuristic themes are completely immersion breaking for me. I have wasted lots of money buying games, thinking "I will just play it" and left them because I just couldn't enjoy it.
Of course you think the causality runs: Game great -> therefore I like it. But what makes you think a game is great is the prior factor. I think what you keep describing as elegance is a preference for complexity of different resource-optimizing strategies, which I can understand. I would agree that Civ5 has less resource optimization opportunities, which is probably why many people feel it is stripped of features that Civ4 had. What you prefer is subjective, however.
reddishrecue
Deity
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2009
- Messages
- 6,442
Most programmers nowadays move on to new works and often leave the old works. It is already apparent because of the earlier versions that have been abandoned up to this day and still move on to new works. I'm guessing that they're making this pattern again to eventually abandon civilization 5 so that they could move on to the new version of civilization. Firaxis should get paid to get staff members to stay in older versions of civilization so that the staff members could stay there and assist people that need assistance. A good example of this is colonization in civilization 4 where no one hardly participates anymore. No one talks about colonization nor replies to colonization. however, some information there is still useful like the patch that I recently downloaded from there that was posted often and worked on awhile back when colonization had come out.
Delnar_Ersike
Prince
Sorry if I was mistaken: your criticism just seem so... generic/bland?... that it really hinted that you either did not read the post fully or that you didn't really understand what I meant. This is the phrase I took as criticism:
You stated that the examples I've come up with for elegant design are all just me waxing nostalgic about Civ4. No pointing out of faulty logic, no counterexamples, just a statement that my thoughts are ungrounded (despite me grounding them with that incredibly long post). You'll understand if I find this to be more of a snobbish dismissal than a grounded dispute.
Disagreement would be if you were to say the examples I gave aren't elegant (that's disagreeing with my statement that Civ4 and Civ3 have elegant design that is specific to those games), or if you came up with similar examples of elegant design in Civ5 (that's disagreeing with my statement that Civ5 is missing elegant design that is specific to its entry).
Strange. So if we renamed and reskinned all the CivBE units, you would enjoy it more? On the flipside, if we renamed and reskinned Civ5 to take place in a futuristic setting, you would enjoy it less? Not being a fan of something is one thing, but having a possibly positive experience turn negative solely due to window dressing is entirely another.
It's like a book being unenjoyable due to its font choice. Or if playing Chess with Star Trek figures made the game less enjoyable than playing with plain figures.
It's not resource optimization. It's design optimization. It's having a game generate the most depth out of the simplest of systems. A game with inelegant design is inefficient with its rules. It's how a game can be easy to learn (few rules to remember), but hard to master (relations between rules generate massive depth). It's the difference between Go (place stones on board, connect stones to create territory, encase other player's stones to remove them from the board, player with the most territory wins) and Risk (rules about reinforcements, cards collected, dice rolled, how many troops cross into an enemy provinces when victories, rules about relocating forces, rules about controlling continents, rules about straits and crossings).
A game can be good without elegant design, but elegant design will always make it better, simply because it lets the designer(s) add new gameplay decisions without burdening the player with more things to keep track of.
Once again, a great game need not have elegant design (eg. Planescape Torment is one of my all-time favorites, but I would never say that its design is elegant), but elegant design always improves a game.
I did not say Civ5 was not good; I said it's missing the sorts of elegant design that could be found in previous Civ games, and that I'm worried that we'll see a similar case with Civ6. One of CivBE's biggest mistakes was that by removing some of the seemingly simple features of previous civ games (eg. Great People, unique units, unique buildings, diverse promotions, having to upgrade obsolete units), Firaxis removed a lot more depth than their CivBE-specific additions could make up for because all the removed systems generated a large amount of unseen depth from the way they interplayed with other gameplay systems (eg. great people interplay with specialists, citizen management, and wonders, unique units interplay with timing and game pace).
bison21
Warlord
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2012
- Messages
- 221
As for my way of saying it: fair enough.
About the futuristic stuff: Yes I would play Civ5 less in that case and I would pick up BE if it were swapped as you suggest. And yes I also would refrain from reading a book because of its font- but I think that analogy is lacking since font choice has a huge practical impact and is not just window dressing. Look, I can tell how alien you find my "superficial" reasoning. All I can say is: yes I agree with you. I have spent money on futuristic games, thinking "jesus christ, just get on with it". Tried them multiple times. I often wondered why. Certainly for all sort of rpg games, I prefer middle aged theme + magic over futuristic + guns'n'lazers'n'*****. I will buy BE once it's for a fiver and have a go at it, and it might be that first game to change my mind. But that risk for a full price? No.
Back to the actual Civ: I meant resource optimization in the social science sense: a bit like rock-paper-scissors. In a repeating game, the optimal strategy will never be fixed- it will "hover" between the three choices (rock, paper or scissors). Basically, are there equilibria? Subgame equilibria?
I like your examples of board games. I love Go, and I think Risk is a really badly designed game. It's lots of rules, but at the end of the day, the die is king. (I think Diplomacy is the better Risk) For me, Go is the better game. It has less "depth" as in, fewer rules, but generates more "depth" precisely because the few rules that exist are sufficient enough in generating a tension between different resources. I couldn't quite make out whether you were making a judgement on either of those games, were you?
As I have never played Planescape Torment or BE I can't really add my perspective on the last paragraph. I don't think we disagree on design choices and depth that much. I think I am just very critical of feature-heavy games, which is what Civ4 definitely is. I mean, I am not talking about the Civ5 launch here- I only started playing Civ4 because vanilla 5 was so broken that even as a new player it was bad. And I could see what the fuss was about Civ4, I saw all these different systems within the game that were competing (I am completely with you there). But please don't dismiss the Stacks-of-Doom argument as a mere carpet-preference. For me, it's not. It leads to really bad, bland strategies that dominate a huge aspect of the game. I don't see that in Civ5 as much. I think the big-bland-strategy is going science, and relying on ***** AI. I think 1UPT is beautiful in game design terms. The options it creates for strategic choices are massive. Maybe, and I am happy to accept that bias, I am more in love with Civ5 design idea than the rest of the game, which can be lacking in certain areas.
So, I think, and I hope I satisfied you with a longer post here, that feature-heaviness is something to be critical of. I am also acutely aware that the demographics of this forum are skewed towards the elite end of players; it's the mmo-champion of Civ. Just looking at the science tree for a minute- the amount of work it takes to learn and optimize picking the right techs depending on the circumstances is huge. I say that whilst many a criticism of Civ5 is valid, it really only becomes valid once you figure out the game. For 95% of the playerbase, that will never be an issue. That is not to say I approve of bad design, I just approve of fewer features. I think this is the main reason Civ4 never managed to win me over even when vanilla-civ5 was unplayable. I like the stripped down game, I get a sense of option there. (Again, Go vs Risk). I suppose I would have to play BE now in order to contribute better to this discussion :,)
About the futuristic stuff: Yes I would play Civ5 less in that case and I would pick up BE if it were swapped as you suggest. And yes I also would refrain from reading a book because of its font- but I think that analogy is lacking since font choice has a huge practical impact and is not just window dressing. Look, I can tell how alien you find my "superficial" reasoning. All I can say is: yes I agree with you. I have spent money on futuristic games, thinking "jesus christ, just get on with it". Tried them multiple times. I often wondered why. Certainly for all sort of rpg games, I prefer middle aged theme + magic over futuristic + guns'n'lazers'n'*****. I will buy BE once it's for a fiver and have a go at it, and it might be that first game to change my mind. But that risk for a full price? No.
Back to the actual Civ: I meant resource optimization in the social science sense: a bit like rock-paper-scissors. In a repeating game, the optimal strategy will never be fixed- it will "hover" between the three choices (rock, paper or scissors). Basically, are there equilibria? Subgame equilibria?
I like your examples of board games. I love Go, and I think Risk is a really badly designed game. It's lots of rules, but at the end of the day, the die is king. (I think Diplomacy is the better Risk) For me, Go is the better game. It has less "depth" as in, fewer rules, but generates more "depth" precisely because the few rules that exist are sufficient enough in generating a tension between different resources. I couldn't quite make out whether you were making a judgement on either of those games, were you?
As I have never played Planescape Torment or BE I can't really add my perspective on the last paragraph. I don't think we disagree on design choices and depth that much. I think I am just very critical of feature-heavy games, which is what Civ4 definitely is. I mean, I am not talking about the Civ5 launch here- I only started playing Civ4 because vanilla 5 was so broken that even as a new player it was bad. And I could see what the fuss was about Civ4, I saw all these different systems within the game that were competing (I am completely with you there). But please don't dismiss the Stacks-of-Doom argument as a mere carpet-preference. For me, it's not. It leads to really bad, bland strategies that dominate a huge aspect of the game. I don't see that in Civ5 as much. I think the big-bland-strategy is going science, and relying on ***** AI. I think 1UPT is beautiful in game design terms. The options it creates for strategic choices are massive. Maybe, and I am happy to accept that bias, I am more in love with Civ5 design idea than the rest of the game, which can be lacking in certain areas.
So, I think, and I hope I satisfied you with a longer post here, that feature-heaviness is something to be critical of. I am also acutely aware that the demographics of this forum are skewed towards the elite end of players; it's the mmo-champion of Civ. Just looking at the science tree for a minute- the amount of work it takes to learn and optimize picking the right techs depending on the circumstances is huge. I say that whilst many a criticism of Civ5 is valid, it really only becomes valid once you figure out the game. For 95% of the playerbase, that will never be an issue. That is not to say I approve of bad design, I just approve of fewer features. I think this is the main reason Civ4 never managed to win me over even when vanilla-civ5 was unplayable. I like the stripped down game, I get a sense of option there. (Again, Go vs Risk). I suppose I would have to play BE now in order to contribute better to this discussion :,)
Delnar_Ersike
Prince
Well, one of the other reason it seems odd is that I can think of a lot of SciFi universes that cross into Fantasy territory and vice versa: Star Wars' the Force and Lightsabers, Shadowrun (Cyberpunk with magic and spirits and demons), basically any Steampunk stuff in fantasy universes (since they are usually used to make things that are futuristic, eg. jetpacks, giant robots, and advanced prosthetics, but with a rusty/brass look), the Kreegan and the Ancients in the old Might and Magic universe, etc. The line between high fantasy and science fantasy (the type of SciFi that is essentially renamed and reskinned high fantasy stuff, eg. magic -> the Force) can get quite blurry at times, so having an aversion for science fantasy while being fine with the more futuristic elements of high fantasy universes seems even more arbitrary.
It also means you can never enjoy SMAC and SMAX, which really is a shame. There's a reason that game is considered a classic: even though it was made before Civ3, elements from that game still find themselves getting implemented into the latest Civ games (eg. Civ4's civics are like SMAC's social engineering, CivBE's unit upgrades are a bit like SMAC's unit foundry). When veterans of civ-style games talk about the best game Sid Meier has ever headed, it's almost always either SMAC or Civ4, with the caveat that Civ5 is probably the best first Sid Meier game you could play (it's the best one if you've never played a civ game before).
I still don't quite get what you mean. Resource optimization is a game theory (mathematical) concept of maximizing total gain. How would you interpret it differently in a "social science sense"? The social science examples I can think of all still follow that original definition, eg. in History, power-holding entities (nations, lords, religions) that found ways to optimize the people they manage generally ended up outperforming their peers, and even their apparent superiors in some instances (possibly why successful governments became dominated by democracies, or more democratic management in the case of nominally authoritarian governments like 1871-1918 Germany, over the years).
Your rock-paper-scissors analogy does not help. The fact that the best choice to pick always changes does not seem to have anything to do with optimizing resources.
The boardgame point is exactly what I meant: Risk is more complex than Go (it has more rules), but it is less [strategically] deep than Go (there are a lot more gameplay possibilities with Go's rules than with Risk's rules). Yes, I prefer Go as well, though I'm still fairly bad at it.
I wouldn't compare Diplomacy to Risk though: sure, their themes are extremely similar (dominate the world!), but their games are completely different. Risk is about snowballing from an initial lucky victory to win with numerical superiority; due to the way the game scales, not even teaming up on someone who is far ahead is enough to offset their numerical advantages. Diplomacy is about negotiating, conniving, and backstabbing your way to victory: with turns being simultaneous and no luck-based combat, player interaction is the only way to ever get ahead and stay ahead. One is a game of luck and snowballing a numerical superiority, the other is about negotiations and backstabbing.
Stacks of doom are a result of unpolished design: Civ4 is full of elegant design to be sure, but it isn't 100% elegant, and the fact that stacks of doom can exist is proof. Collateral damage would have been the answer had Civ4's designers decided to give it to more than just siege units, which have too low of a combat strength to ever pull off stack-of-doom-killing moves (if units with higher combat strength and/or chance to withdraw had it, a stack of four of those units could easily wipe out a 15-unit stack of doom, because by the time the third unit attacked, all the units in the stack would be too damaged to fight back). The Fall from Heaven 2 mod went further and implemented a type of unit that always attacked the weakest unit in a stack (the Assassin/Sniper), thus allowing you to pick off support units without having to whittle down the entire stack to get to them (via collateral or attrition through withdraw); plus, it was kind of required, given that the mod added low combat strength Mages that could do all sorts of nasty stuff, like adding a temporary +20% strength buff to everyone in its stack, or making everyone in its stack invisible, or creating temporary fireball units with collateral damage that could ruin large stacks.
However, the fact that units can stack on top of each other makes sure that the production value of a unit is always the same, and that is the fundamental problem with 1UPT. As your army grows, new units cannot be brought to the front: there are only so many directions you can attack a set of tiles from, particularly with a hex-based system or a square-based system without diagonals. The fact that units do not usually die from melee combat amplifies this problem, as does the fact that units can buy instant-heals with combat XP. The overall end result is that 1) production spent on units is incredibly powerful when you don't have a lot of units, but falls of rapidly depending on expected frontage, 2) units that can only attack adjacent tiles are much less useful than those that can attack tiles further away, especially if those ranged units do not take damage from attacking and if the melee units do not have the movement points needed to close gaps quicker than the opponent can retreat, and 3) units that CAN stack (air units in Civ5) are exponentially more powerful, especially if they cannot take damage from attacking (Stealth Bombers, bombers attacking against someone without interception) and can always move out of harm's way if needed (rebase ranges are huge and rebasing is never intercepted). The solutions required to address all the issues would only push the problems to become relevant at different numbers of units instead of solving the problem (eg. increasing plot limit from 1 to 2), be incredibly unintuitive (eg. scaling unit production costs with number of military units and cities), and/or have side-effects that would make the situation worse (eg. removing insta-heal promotions would make melee units almost worthless in the face of ranged units that can fire from safety).
Doing away with unit plot limits would be the ideal solution. Simply making collateral damage more prominent would eliminate the effectiveness of stacks of doom without the baggage that hard units-per-tile limits bring with them. Players would be better of having 2-4 units per stack, maybe more if they had a lot of units to spare, than to have them all bunched up in one stack, ready to be taken out by 4 units with collateral.
I don't think Civ5 has less features than Civ4; in fact, I would actually say it has more features. The sole difference is that people pick up on the fact that Civ4's features interact with each other a lot more than Civ5's, so what they imagine are features in Civ4 are just some of the more obvious interactions between the actual features.
For example, there are 43 UA's in Civ5 (one for each leader), while there are only 11 leader traits in Civ4; however, because leaders in Civ4 have access to two leader traits, there are 55 effective leader possibilities in Civ4, and that's before we consider that some leader possibilities have access to the same UU's and UB's. The city-state system alone has more features to it than Civ4's religions, corporations, and civics combined, but most of those features are insignificant enough (city-state personalities) and/or too random (city-state quests) that people tend to ignore them. Civ5's ideology system alone has vastly more features than Civ4's civic system: the former has 47628 total combinations, and this is all without considering possibilities unlocked by getting two free tenets from being the ideological founder, while the latter has 3125 total combinations. The difference between the two is that of those 47628 combinations in Civ5's ideology system from tenets alone, most of them (at least 99%) either have similar enough effects to another combination (eg. combinations with Universal Healthcare vs. combinations with Socialist Realism) or not part of any viable strategy (eg. picking up all three tier 3 tenets), so the player really only has to think about 476 combinations or so. On the other hand, of those 3125 combinations in Civ4's civic system, all of them have different enough effects and at least 50% are viable (things like Pacifism with Police State obviously aren't), so the player has to think about 3 times as many combinations in Civ4's civic system than in Civ5's ideology system.
So yeah, I guess that's the issue: it's not that Civ4 has more features than Civ5, it's that even newbies pick up on the fact that Civ4's features play together a lot more than Civ5's do, so they see the possibility of deeper strategies right from the getgo, which may intimidate them. Then there's the case that Civ4 often lets you switch between options (eg. switching from Free Speech to Nationhood for 20 turns, then switching back to Free Speech), while Civ5 locks you into your decisions (with the exception of switching ideologies, but that's rarely viable), for better or for worse (eg. you cannot re-lock Mandate of Heaven later on when you no longer need its effects to reduce the culture cost of your next policy as if you hadn't unlocked Mandate of Heaven in the first place).
The fact that Civ5's issues only become noticeable once you figure out the game is why I usually tell people that Civ4 is better than Civ5, but Civ5 is the best first civ game to play (ie. if you have never played a civ game before): the more familiar you are with civ games, the quicker you'll start seeing Civ5's issues, therefore you'll reach the point at which Civ4 is more enjoyable than Civ5 faster.
Also, like Kin, I wouldn't recommend you buy CivBE. Try the demo if 100 turns is enough, play it during the next Free Weekend (if there will be one), watch other people play it, or acquire it through other means, but I really, really don't recommend you spend money on it, especially if you're already averse to its theme (which, maybe along with the way it handles trade routes, may be the best thing about that below-average 4X).
reddishrecue
Deity
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2009
- Messages
- 6,442
Civilization 6 could be way better. I guess the only thing that made civ 4 better than civ 5 is the better loading times. Civ 5 took awhile to load even in a half way decent computer and specs.
I'd only buy Civ VI if it learns from the many, many, many mistakes of Civ V.
The big gripes / things which would be a good idea:
- 1UPT is stifling, both to the AI and to a human player. It doesn't work.
- Implement simultaneous turns properly - i.e., every turn, players input orders for their units/cities, and the commands execute simultaneously. This would streamline multiplayer, and would lead to different/interesting strategic options for single player.
- Consider moving away from tile-based yields, and convert all population units into "specialists". For farmers, the yield for each farmer is based on the quality of surrounding terrain + improvements.
- Nothing like Civ V's global happiness system. TBH happiness as a hard cap to growth shouldn't be a thing, the way luxuries work right now is just annoying.
- Science shouldn't be king. Civilization V is bad about this, but this applies to the whole series and is perhaps a bias of the creators. I'd be fine with beaker/science generation being severely constrained in the early game, so that players are encouraged to focus on growth and production rather than beelining for stuff that makes beakers.
- Don't put in religion as a money-making mechanic. If religion should have a place, it should be as an independent social pressure placed on your civilization, rather than a "hey, you want more gold" mechanic. I never questioned the non-existence of religion in the first two civs, no sense in fixing what wasn't broken.
- Ranged bombardment of any sort needs to be SEVERELY limited.
- Likewise, repairing units shouldn't trivialize combat. Even a victorious army should suffer casualties, and need to replace them with material.
- Don't have Unique Abilities, Units, or Buildings. It adds a layer of balancing that takes away from the core game. Civilizations should differentiate themselves according to their geography, interactions with others, and decisions the player makes.
The good in Civ5:
- Hexes are a dramatic improvement over squares.
- I really like social policies, even though it winds up being a win-more mechanic and there's really only one SP path that is consistently worthwhile.
- Cities that can defend themselves is a much-derided mechanic, but I think it's a good step.
Of course I would be interested if the game went in an entirely different direction with how resources, units, workers, etc. worked, rather than replicating the same basic concepts. However, they should still avoid the same pratfalls that Civ V's design had, ESPECIALLY 1UPT.
The big gripes / things which would be a good idea:
- 1UPT is stifling, both to the AI and to a human player. It doesn't work.
- Implement simultaneous turns properly - i.e., every turn, players input orders for their units/cities, and the commands execute simultaneously. This would streamline multiplayer, and would lead to different/interesting strategic options for single player.
- Consider moving away from tile-based yields, and convert all population units into "specialists". For farmers, the yield for each farmer is based on the quality of surrounding terrain + improvements.
- Nothing like Civ V's global happiness system. TBH happiness as a hard cap to growth shouldn't be a thing, the way luxuries work right now is just annoying.
- Science shouldn't be king. Civilization V is bad about this, but this applies to the whole series and is perhaps a bias of the creators. I'd be fine with beaker/science generation being severely constrained in the early game, so that players are encouraged to focus on growth and production rather than beelining for stuff that makes beakers.
- Don't put in religion as a money-making mechanic. If religion should have a place, it should be as an independent social pressure placed on your civilization, rather than a "hey, you want more gold" mechanic. I never questioned the non-existence of religion in the first two civs, no sense in fixing what wasn't broken.
- Ranged bombardment of any sort needs to be SEVERELY limited.
- Likewise, repairing units shouldn't trivialize combat. Even a victorious army should suffer casualties, and need to replace them with material.
- Don't have Unique Abilities, Units, or Buildings. It adds a layer of balancing that takes away from the core game. Civilizations should differentiate themselves according to their geography, interactions with others, and decisions the player makes.
The good in Civ5:
- Hexes are a dramatic improvement over squares.
- I really like social policies, even though it winds up being a win-more mechanic and there's really only one SP path that is consistently worthwhile.
- Cities that can defend themselves is a much-derided mechanic, but I think it's a good step.
Of course I would be interested if the game went in an entirely different direction with how resources, units, workers, etc. worked, rather than replicating the same basic concepts. However, they should still avoid the same pratfalls that Civ V's design had, ESPECIALLY 1UPT.
bison21
Warlord
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2012
- Messages
- 221
Sorry I know GT is mathematics, but it's so crucial to economics that I attribute it to Social science, professional bias
The rock-paper-scissors example I used to illustrate that having no single best strategy at any given time is what I prefer in a game. Resource optimization is just the attempt to maximize your gains given your restraints. So you can put all citizens on food tiles to maximize your food, but the payoff is production/people slots. Resource optimization in political science, to name an example since you asked, is for example the choices leaders have to make between gaining votes and following their parties' interests, which will often not be the same. For a dictator in a non-democratic setting, R.O. can mean the payoffs between allocating the army in places that are deemed valuable to the regime (for example mines, natural resources) and alternatively not causing such grievance to the population in the first place, but then limiting the share of the profits. Etc etc
I love this paragraph.
So, first of all I don't understand why you assume that any new units would simply arrive at "the end of the carpet", thus not being effective (I do agree that production value declines, albeit probably not in a linear fashion). As a warmonger, what is usually the best strategy is to have a combination of strong, promoted units, and weak supply units to prevent back-stabbing and war-on-two-fronts. Unit promotions are so valuable that they, properly used, can make a big difference in mid-to-late-game war. The adjacent-tile-heal promotion, +1 range and double attack just to name a few.
The superiority of ranged units has been lamented since vanilla and I don't think it would be overly complicated to address it. Either reduce their total power, increase their penalty vs. melee units, or, which is what I would do, give ranged units that are not siege units a massive penalty against cities, thus making CB/XB rushes impossible without bringing 1-2 catapults/ballistas. Because the main reason that human players spam ranged units is because it's the optimal strategy against city taking, which is really the point of the warmonger game. 5 ranged + 1 horse, that's it. Quite disappointing.
Another "fix" could be to reduce the zone-of-control penalty for melee units. Not eradicate it but reduce it, thus exposing ranged units to attack unless they are protected by melees. I think in an optimal game of 1UPT, you would want to see that melee-front, ranged-back and cavalry-flanks are viable(!!!! not just aesthetically pleasing) strategies. I don't think this is unthinkable.
I don't understand why you are saying "The solutions required to address all the issues would only push the problems to become relevant at different numbers of units instead of solving the problem"- should it be in our interest that any fix would work with a single unit? After all, the 1UPT problems arise with increasing unit numbers, not in 1v1 combat, where melee can have the upper hand, even.
However I'm not dogmatic about 1UPT and stacks up to 3 or 4 wouldn't break the deal for me at all, I just can't see why that is required given the options that you have with adjacent-tile promotions, which should be focussed on since 1UPT means units will HAVE to be adjacent a lot of the time.
I agree on the civic vs tenets thing, really. Ideology changing brought some flexibility in, but I agree it's not enough. If I could pick one feature from civ4 it would probably be culture flipping tiles. Yes it exists in a way in civ5 but its threshold is so high it basically isn't a viable strategy.
Only the conclusion I have to disagree with
I don't think it's a completely logical step from figuring out Civ5 and then thus preferring Civ4. Strictly speaking if that were true, we wouldn't be seeing all these Deity players on Civ5, streaming and recording their matches even after BE came out, and a lot of them being proficient in Civ4 as well. I think the 1UPT change is so big and so different, that you basically have the choice between two games that screw up different things and are good at different things, making the entire thing preference-based. Which I think it is, and these countless and never-ending debates on "which is better" indicate: not one game wins the trophy. Because combat is vital for almost all games, unless you are completely isolated, it's a huge thing (I repeat myself) and I think that Civ5 gives the illusion of, or perhaps even some real, choice in war. I know stacks of doom offer lots of maximizing choices, as this guide illustrates, but perhaps it is precisely the fact that production power of units is so high at low unit numbers that 1UPT is so appealing: creating an army is a huge resource with lots of payoffs. So this is not so much about "total number of possible strategies SoD vs 1UPT" but rather, how much the player feels the decision to war is a payoff against other things.Similar threads
